From Russia With Tech Support: Open Source NGINX Remakes Web Servers

NGINX has surpassed Microsoft IIS as the world's second most popular web server. Image: Netcraft

The second most popular web server on the planet no longer comes from Microsoft. It comes from NGINX. And now, the tiny Russian outfit wants to actually make some money from its widely popular open source server software.

This week, the company announced that it’s now officially offering technical support and consulting services to businesses everywhere. In other words, if you sign a three- to 12-month contract, the company will help you install and configure the NGINX web server — a means of hosting websites — and when things go wrong, it help with that too. “The idea is to offer more predictable technical support — as opposed to the best-effort support from the open source community,” says Andrew Alexeev, the co-founder of NGINX (pronounced “Engine X”).

Alexeev tells Wired that the nine-person company is already serving a handful of paying customers but declined to name them. The company was incorporated in the summer of last year, and this is its first official commercial offering.

Russian engineer Igor Sysoev wrote the first version of the NGINX web server in 2002, and it was released as open source software in 2004. Eight years later, according to statistics from Netcraft, an internet research firm, NGINX now helps to serve up 9.9 percent of the world’s internet domains, including Facebook, Dropbox and WordPress.

Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server) still runs 14.4 percent of domains, and the king of web serving, the open source Apache, runs 65 percent. But NGINX is very much on the rise. When Netcraft looks at “active sites” — sites that are regularly updated and managed — NGINX vaults into the number two spot. In February, its data showed that NGINX ran 12.18 percent of active sites (22.2 million), while 12.14 percent ran IIS (22.1 million).

NGINX has achieved such success in large part because it’s specifically designed to handle a large number of connections with relatively little memory — and like Apache, it’s cheaper than IIS. “So-called Web 2.0 websites do run into scalability issues with Apache, and with Microsoft you run into cost,” says Jay Lyman, an analyst with research outfit 451 Research. “NGINX wins in these highly scalable environments.”

Now, Alexeev, Igor Sysoev, and a third Russian engineer have joined forces to build a company around the success of the server. In addition to offering direct support for the software, Alexeev says, the company plans to eventually help other large IT outfits provide support as well.